Monthly Archives: December 2011

28

Dec. ’11

New Year’s Commitments

I’m not much into New Year’s resolutions. Even though the concept is rooted in the word “resolve,” it seems that resolutions are made to be broken.

If you don’t believe me, just ask some gym managers to tell you what months their treadmill and weight room usage peaks, and how quickly that usage declines. Resolutions are mostly about us saying, “I’ll give it a shot and see what happens.”

Christian living is about year-round commitment, the kind of wholehearted, “I’m in” attitude that raises our level of joy dramatically. Christian commitment drives Christian ministry, changing the world for the better. And because Christian commitment has a huge spiritual component, it also is sustained by the Holy Spirit, helping us avoid burnout.

All of us in church, myself included, need to take time occasionally to measure our commitment. The first of the year is as good a time as any.

As a starting point, here’s a basic question: How are we responding to the salvation freely given to us by Jesus Christ? Because all Christians are called to spread the good news, I would suggest that our commitment should in some way sustain the church’s primary mission: to offer Christ to those who don’t understand that salvation is available.

When you commit to pray, you are changing the world. Pray for the lost, pray for the hurting, pray for the church to be effective. I’ll admit that how prayer works is often a mystery. Pray anyway. We pray in faith, knowing we’re pushing creation toward full reunion with God.

When you commit to be present in the life of the church, you empower your local congregation to better do God’s work in the local community. You help your church worship well; you help your church serve the world. For example, at Cassidy UMC, you might find yourself feeding the hungry, something this congregation particularly likes to do. Or maybe you’ll help us grow our children and youth into the Christian adults the world so desperately needs. There are lots of opportunities to serve.

When you commit your gifts of money, you make ministry happen. Yes, the church needs your money; every institution in our culture needs money to operate, and in a church run by good stewards, the money is used in holy ways. I feel I’ve been at Cassidy long enough to affirm that buildings and staff are in place so that people may know Christ. Also, Cassidy’s budgets are designed so that others may know Christ through our ministries.

An unfunded church is like a car without gas—it’s going nowhere. Can you commit a percentage of your income in 2012? A church filled with tithers, people who commit 10 percent of their income toward ministry, can do great ministry quickly. Few American churches are full of tithers, nor even committed givers. Too few Christians are carrying the load for others.

When you commit to be a witness, you promise to know the story of Jesus Christ well enough to tell it. Therefore, you also are making a commitment to study. You then find people who need to hear the story, building friendships along the way so you earn the right to tell it.

When Jesus died for our sins, he didn’t do it halfheartedly. The cross took commitment. And in committing to the cross despite his anxiety, best revealed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36-46), Jesus became all his Father intended him to be.

For us, too, commitment is not about rules. It is about becoming what God would have us be, in the process helping the world become what God says it will be.

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25

Dec. ’11

What Child Is This?

John 1:1-14

By now, we’ve heard quite a bit about the birth of baby Jesus, particularly if we’ve managed to attend a Christmas Eve service somewhere. And it is a glorious story, a warm place in Scripture where our souls can bask for awhile.

It also is a meaningless story unless we understand who Jesus is—why his arrival means so much. I do sometimes wonder if Christmas has become so secularized that it’s possible to slip through the season without considering Christ’s eternal nature and impact on the world.

Like the shepherds in Luke’s birth story must have done, we have to ask, why this baby? And then we have to take advantage of something the shepherds did not have, the full story of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament together.

Hold your Bible in your hand for a minute. Find that slim section known as the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—and pinch them between your fingers. These few pages in four different ways tell the story of a man who, in less than 40 years of living, made sense of all that comes in the pages before and all that comes after, all the way up to our present day.

To understand the baby in the manger, we even can go back to the first people in the garden, seeing or perhaps even re-seeing what we might call the fall, the break from God, or the big mistake.

A couple of weeks ago, I had one of those exciting moments where you see something very familiar from Scripture in a new way. Oddly enough, I was watching a cooking segment on an early morning news show.

The guest food expert was showing the proper way to prepare a pomegranate, a popular fruit during the Christmas season. He showed how to slice it down the sides, submerge it in a big bowl of water, and then pull the fruit apart, separating the edible seeds from the skin and pulp.

Forbidden Fruit? (Fir0002/Flagstaffotos)

This technique, he said, was to avoid the huge mess usually made when opening up a pomegranate. The juice is known for staining both clothing and skin.

What came to mind as I watched this segment is that in Jewish tradition, the forbidden fruit Eve took from the tree and gave to her husband was most likely a pomegranate. (There are some other candidates; a fruit called a “quince” comes up now and then, but the pomegranate appears repeatedly in Jewish religious tradition.) Our notion that she plucked an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a western idea—the fruit is not actually identified in the story.

Imagine for a moment how seeing a pomegranate in the story changes it. Eve had no knife or bowl of water. Rather than delicately nibbling an apple, she would have ripped the pomegranate open with her bare hands to get at the deep red seeds, which are a true delight to the eyes. The purple juice would have sprayed, running down her arms and generally making a mess. Perhaps she and Adam would have even buried their mouths in the segments, staining their faces in the process.

We are reminded of just how beautiful sin initially can seem. But it just gets messier and stickier the deeper we find ourselves in it. The stains left by sin can even seem permanent.

“Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me, says the Lord God,” the prophet Jeremiah told the sinful people of Judah.

Enter the Christ child, who was so much more than just a baby. John’s gospel opens by telling us his identity. He is the Word, the essence of God, and the Word “became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

Only God in human form could overcome the mess we have made through sinning. Jesus grew into adulthood to teach us how people not stained by sin would love God and one another. He then made it possible for those stains to disappear by going to the cross, allowing humans to make a bloody mess of the flesh God had taken on, suffering to the core of his divine soul in the process.

In Christ’s suffering and death we are mysteriously restored to God. We simply have to believe that what Jesus did was effective. As proof, we trust in the accounts of the resurrection, and our own experiences of the Holy Spirit, God working within us.

If you struggle with believing your particular, horrible stains can disappear, look to Revelation, the final book of the Bible, a vision of creation set right through Christ’s work.

In Revelation 7:13-14, the man having the vision, known as John of Patmos, sees worshipers standing before God in heaven.

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

We also have Revelation 22:14 to consider: “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.” There we are, back at the trees of paradise, this time entitled to the fruit giving eternal life.

That’s why we remember the baby; he carries us into eternity. Merry Christmas, indeed.

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24

Dec. ’11

A Child Is Born

The story of the birth of Jesus is both marvelous and deeply important to the world. Even nonbelievers have been heavily impacted by it, simply because Christianity has been a key driver of human history for nearly 2,000 years.

For a complete view of Christianity, you have to understand Jesus as an adult, and in particular, you have to understand the importance of his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. Jesus’ birth narrative, however, is the beginning of the description of Jesus as the promised Messiah, evidence that God has chosen to be with us in the most personal of ways.

News this important needs to be told. Luke’s spare, tight account of the birth is all about the telling, with voices declaring Jesus as Messiah from both heaven and earth.

Already, angels have punctuated the story repeatedly, prepping the key players for what is to come. The actual birth happens in a straightforward manner. Mary and Joseph make their way to Bethlehem in answer to a census, and while there, Luke tells us, “The time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

The formal birth announcement comes from heaven, with angels appearing before lowly shepherds, declaring the arrival of “a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” The angels tell the shepherds how to find this great miracle—look for something common. “This will be a sign for you: You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

I find it instructive that while angels began the announcement, the proclamation effort quickly was turned over to humans, and quite common humans at that, at least in worldly terms. God’s good news spread from the bottom up, ensuring that the people usually left out of key events were the first to know about the most important event.

The shepherds went in search of evidence of what they had heard, finding it in a primitive barn. The baby in the manger was enough for them to begin to tell others what they had seen, causing amazement.

And here we are now, still celebrating what God has done for us through this miraculous birth. Word has spread not because of angels but because of faithful telling and re-telling from generation to generation.

Have you told anyone lately? Have you amazed anyone with the story of how much God loves his creation? Have you helped the joy of Christmas seep into others’ souls so their joy may be eternal?

What an opportunity the Christmas season is!

I wish you a merry Christmas, and I pray that you will carry Christmas to those in need of good news.

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19

Dec. ’11

The Favored One

Luke 1:26-38

The mother of Jesus fascinates some people to the point of controversy. A lot of Protestants find the Roman Catholic devotion to Mary disturbing, particularly if that love seems to elevate her to a godlike status.

Scripturally, Mary is to be understood as human. We Protestants, however, need to be careful not to throw momma out with the baby’s bath water—Mary is perhaps the most important mere human to have ever lived. (I say “mere” human to take Jesus, who was in some mysterious way both fully human and fully divine, out of contention.)

After all, Mary was the “favored one,” the first chapter of Luke’s gospel tells us. God found Mary worthy to carry the messiah, God in flesh, in her womb. Jesus’ devotion to and love for her was evident even as he hung dying on a cross.

So, what made Mary so special?

Earlier, when I described her as perhaps the most important mere human to have ever lived, some of you may have flinched a little. Did you begin to run other possible candidates through your mind: biblical characters like Abraham or Moses, or great historic figures?

If you did so, consider whether you’re attaching worldly standards to the word “important.” God’s standards are different from worldly standards; humility and unwavering faith would seem to top the divine list.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget bravery. Stoning was the punishment of the day for a poor, unwed pregnant girl, which is how her neighbors would have viewed Mary. To follow God while facing such dire circumstances required a heart wide-open to God’s will, one willing to disregard the potential personal cost.

God chose Mary, it seems, because she had the right soul for the task. She was young, perhaps as young as 14, but Luke 1:46-55 demonstrates her remarkable understanding of the meaning of Christ’s coming.

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant,” Mary said. She was rejoicing with her much older cousin Elizabeth, who carried in her womb John the Baptist, the prophet who would announce the coming of Jesus’ ministry in adulthood.

As Mary continued in her prophetic rejoicing, she laid out the radical mission of Christ. He brings mercy to those who believe and follow God. He scatters the proud. He brings down the powerful. He lifts up the lowly and the hungry. He does all of this as a fulfillment of a promise made to the world through Abraham long ago.

And of course, we now understand that Jesus grew up to accomplish this radical realignment of power through his death on the cross, a sacrifice designed to break the grip of sin.

Governments and armies still seem to have power, but none can help you establish a relationship with God. At best, they can keep the relationship freely available.

Mary’s song also calls us to magnify the Lord, regardless of our ability to carry children. The baby in her womb would reveal God’s nature to all; as the body of Christ on earth today, Christians similarly exhibit God’s Spirit to a hurting world.

And while this task requires humility and faith, it also makes us revolutionaries, like the quiet, demure Mary who suddenly sang of a world to be turned upside down.

The great Scottish theologian William Barclay noted that Mary’s song declares three great “revolutions” that her child would spark in the world.

First, God “has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.” That is a moral revolution, Barclay noted, bringing about the death of pride. People cannot understand their brokenness and their need for Christ and at the same time remain convinced they are somehow superior to others.

Second, Mary sang that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” That, Barclay said, is a social revolution.

If we are to magnify God, we ignore labels used to sort people as important or unimportant. In every face, the Christian sees God’s creation. In every person, a Christian sees a life for whom Christ died.

Third, Mary tells us that the hungry are filled and the rich are sent away empty. Barclay called this part of the song a declaration of an economic revolution.

“A non-Christian society is an acquisitive society where each man is out to amass as much as he can get,” Barclay wrote. “A Christian society is a society where no man dares to have too much while others have too little, where every man must get only to give away.”

Oh, to magnify the Lord in every moment of our lives, to allow revolution to occur in every choice we make. It isn’t easy, of course.

Fortunately, the baby who grew to be a man and live out his mother’s prophecies did not shrink from the difficult task of the cross. May God grant us similar courage in this season.

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05

Dec. ’11

Leveling and Straightening

Isaiah 40:1-11

I’ve recently developed a new appreciation for flat, smooth roads.

I bought something called a Trikke, which looks like an oversized kiddie scooter. It’s not for toddlers, however. Instead of a platform, there are two bars running from the front wheel to two back wheels. You stand over the two back wheels and hold on to a handlebar, which controls a long post attached to the front wheel.

The joints are all cambered; to make the Trikke go, you get it rolling by kicking the ground scooter-style and then twist and rock the whole thing to propel the inverted V forward. I got the Trikke for exercise. (I seem lately to be suffering from “fat pastor syndrome.”) Riding this contraption is a lot of fun, but frankly, I’m not yet very good at it.

The Trikke goes great downhill, of course. I can keep it going pretty well on a level, smooth surface, too. As for uphill—well, at least I get a lot of exercise pushing it, looking like Fred Flintstone starting his car as my feet scurry between the v-shaped bars.

Because of my Trikke experience, Isaiah 40:1-11 has taken on a whole new meaning for me. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God,” we read there. “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low, the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”

Not that the prophet was saying God would arrive in the Holy Land on a Trikke.  It’s just that I’ve developed a new appreciation for smoothing out those physical hills and rough places that also stand as symbols of life’s impediments, its pain and disappointment. (Overweight bicyclists, hikers and runners will probably understand this metaphor, too.)

The people of Judah, one of two kingdoms that had come out of a fractured Israel, certainly would have understood Isaiah’s words on both a literal and metaphorical level. In the 39th chapter, Isaiah had predicted the Babylonian conquest and the taking of God’s “chosen people” into captivity as punishment for their sins. In the 40th chapter, however, Isaiah seems to be addressing people already in captivity, separated from their homeland by a rugged stretch of desert.

While comprehensible, Isaiah’s words also must have sounded very strange. No hope seemed in sight for a captive people far from home. The idea of the God who had condemned them leading them home along an easily traversed highway must have seemed improbable, even on a metaphorical level.

Perhaps that explains verses 6 through 8, with their withered grass and faded flowers standing as Lamentations-like complaints about the temporary nature of life. When God seems far away and you see nothing but life’s pain, cynicism creeps in. Isaiah tries to reflect the mood of the times he lived in, as well as difficult times to come.

He also notes, however, that the word of our God will stand forever. It is a nugget of hope, both for the Jews trapped in bondage and for us today.

During this Advent season—this time of year when we re-experience the Jewish longing for a messiah, and our own longing for Jesus Christ’s return—we remember this passage from Isaiah for the encouragement it ultimately brings. God does come.

“See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him,” Isaiah says. “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

Eight centuries later, another prophet, John the Baptist, would evoke Isaiah’s words in proclaiming Jesus as the promised Savior. And it was God himself, we discovered, who would level and straighten the path through our rugged, sin-pocked deserts so we could return to a relationship with our creator.

God triumphs! He triumphs through Christ’s suffering and death on the cross, with Jesus’ resurrection providing proof that sin and death are defeated.

Following God’s straight, smooth path requires only that we believe—no theological twisting and contorting, no pushing our way over the hills. Simple belief.

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04

Dec. ’11

Immanuel

The following is not actually from one of my sermons. I wrote it for a newsletter, but as it is seasonal, I thought I would share it here, too.

—————-

It is the time of year when at least one preacher can get, well, a little preachy. To prove this, all I have to do is look at some of my past December newsletter articles written for other churches.

I have to say, however, that what has bothered me in the past during December still bothers me now. It is the loud, secular “spend spend” message that can overwhelm the subtle, sacred message of Advent, a time when we should be anticipating Christ’s full and complete return. To the marketers, Christmas cannot come early enough.

By the time we get around to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations of Christ’s birth, many people have missed the purpose of Advent entirely and are too exhausted to experience fully the miracle of the incarnation. The actual Christmas season, which runs until Jan. 6, becomes an annoying afterthought, a house guest who has lingered too long.

(See, I told you I can get a little preachy this time of year.)

I have no earth-shaking, revolutionary solutions. I suspect the power of secular, commercial media will remain until Christ returns. I can offer only a simple strategy that might help us keep our minds focused and refreshed as we move toward Christmas.

At the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, we hear the genealogy of Jesus and are reminded of our savior’s miraculous birth. “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord has spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel,’ which means, God with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23.)

Immanuel: God with us. Yes, they named him Jesus, but Jesus was and is God with us.

During the blitz of commercials, mute the television’s sound and say out loud, “Immanuel.”

In the frantic shopping, remember to whisper now and then, “Immanuel.”

In the lonely moments you may feel, call out, “Immanuel.”

And certainly, make time to worship, crying out, “Immanuel.”

God is with us, and God will make his presence fully known and undeniable one day. And on that day, even the marketers will rejoice.

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